Video transcript

Voiceover: Three years
prior to the making of this painting, Pollock was working
on a small easel painting. He had struggled on it for a
while, and he decided to take that painting off the easel,
place it on the floor, and then pour some paint on the
surface to finish it. >From this deceptively simple
decision, an entire set of creative possibilities
opened up to Pollock, and he spent the next five years of
his career exploring them. Now, in the studio, let's see
exactly how Pollock worked. Placing the canvas on the floor,
Pollock no longer remained in physical contact with
the canvas while painting. Instead of using conventional
artist brushes to push or smear liquid paint across
the surface of the painting, Pollock now used things
like sticks, even turkey basters or dried paint
brushes, hard as a rock, that he variously
dripped, drizzled, poured, or splashed paint onto
the canvas below him from. Pollock used very fluid
alkyd enamel paints, the kind of paint you
could paint your car with, the kind of paint you could
paint your radiator with. Because the paint was so
fluid, Pollock essentially drew in space, so that
drawing elements would happen quite literally in
the air, before falling down to the canvas below, sometimes
thick, sometimes thin. A rhythm of poured paint would develop across the surface of the painting. Now, if you know that
the painting was painted on the floor, if you
know that the paint has a very low viscosity, you
can very easily imagine the kind of physical
activities that would go into the making of this type of painting. Art historians, at the
time, coined this kind of painting, action painting,
because of this very idea that you could
imagine quite viscerally the actions that went into
the making of the painting. Now, specifically, we're talking about the actions of almost a dancer. You can imagine Pollock's feet shuffling around the painting. You can imagine rotations of the elbow and of the shoulder, variously launching or slowly drizzling paint
onto the canvas below. For Pollock, the drama
of making this painting on the floor meant that
not only physically but emotionally he could be
in the painting, stepping into the canvas, but also
losing himself in almost this trance-like or zone-like
type of painting process. Looking at the paint
below you on the surface of the canvas, reacting
to it, and adjusting whatever gestures you have
to create this painting. Now, traditionally in
painting, people would compose one shape
according to another one. A little bit of red here,
according to a little bit of blue there, according to
a lot of yellow over here. Well, for Pollock, he threw that out the window, as he did so many things. Rather, Pollock is composing
one line in juxtaposition with another one, and
not in any haphazard way, but rather in an all over
way, and this all-overness, if you will, becomes key for Pollock. Since looking at this painting, there's no one spot for your eye to rest. Traditionally, line had
been used quite literally to delineate forms, to draw the outlines of forms, which would be filled in. You can imagine landscape paintings. The lines define the
mountains, clouds, and so on. Well, here the line is
not defining anything. Line becomes here autonomous,
and for the first time is liberated from its historical role in painting of describing other shapes. In 1950, the drama of
making this painting was actually captured by a
photographer and film maker, so that the performance
of making this painting captured the public's
imagination as never before. Not only that, but other
artists were profoundly influenced by this radically
new way of working, not only painters, but,
well, performance artists can be traced back to
this very very formative moment, very important moment
in American art history.